“Postpositivity in Spring”
1
So much
for poetry
and no more.
Perpetual
norm dawn
raising its awning
in purple
pose
for traffic
to battle
under galore. It’s nice
to imagine you
sitting down
to write me
and putting it off.
Not to owe
is good but
to owe and be let
off is better.
Is that true,
sweetie? Or shall
I just
talk over myself
like rain
over
night
when the soft
ware up
date tunes
me up to spit
out wall to
wall wind
socks “come
morn.” It’s cool
in the shade,
warm in the
collapse
of the
avant sun
franchise
radiating out
across the retooled day
where nobody’s
allowed in and
none of these objects
(the traffic, etc.)
are real, and
mean it.
2
Face up to it
Enjambment
is not going
to sort your
face out. “Those
were difficult
days.” That
browser
is no longer
supported
but you know
that. The
policy may be
that the screen
you’re writing on
is not the screen
you’re
reading.
It goes something like
the statement
of fact connects
us to a pin
and the pin refuses
to refuse and
in fact spreads
out everywhere
as a knowledge
slick. How
else can it be put
down. It’s like
there is
no space
to which
to go
which is
a property
of space
to aggressively annotate, even
out here
where it becomes
untrue as
either urge,
to love
or not, becomes untrue
when pressed
hard enough
against
yourself,
like waves
flattened against
an upright
pane of glass
planted in
the middle
of the “flood
of subject.”
3
There’s a group
of isolated
new words like incoming
to step
up on
when the
desire to anything
is gone. This is
the uninhabitable
place after
becomes
now is
the final line
of this poem,
and then
the last
but now
how many,
ah ha. Funny
does it hurt less
it starts
to hurt
less.
______________________________
Excerpted from Sleepers Awake: Poems by Oli Hazzard. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Oli Hazzard. All rights reserved.
